


Blackberries in the Sun

by Mithen



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Family, Gen, Reflection, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-06 02:30:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12202086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: On her way to the day's training session, Antiope thinks about her niece's destiny.





	Blackberries in the Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BradyGirl_12](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BradyGirl_12/gifts).



Antiope strides through the late-summer grasses, squinting at the bright sun. Grasshoppers flee her sandals and thistle seeds lift into the air in her wake, shaken loose by her steps. The meeting went late, and it feels good to be out of the council room at last. Hours of listening to her fellow Amazons drone on about architecture, about education, about agriculture. All valuable, useful parts of Amazon society, and certainly worth debating for an afternoon, but now her hands itch to hold a sword and her ears yearn for the sound of clashing steel. She had told Queen Hippolyta she was off to train some young cadets.

When her sister finds out the truth…

Antiope’s footsteps falter for a moment. Then she moves ahead once more. There had been no other way, and her sister will forgive her in time.

Diana--and humanity--would never have forgiven her if she had let the princess go untrained.

She reaches the edge of the woods and pushes through the underbrush. Bright swarms of midges hover in the air, and far off a cuckoo sings. Even further off is the low, long roar of the sea that has been part of her life for millennia now. It underpins every moment on Themyscira, makes its way into their songs, their poems, their dances. They make love to its rise and fall.

It is neverending, like Antiope’s knowledge that war is coming, that they must be ready. She wakes to it, she sleeps to it, it is the heartbeat that drives her on. _Be ready, be ready, be ready._ She knows Diana can feel it too, even if she does not know what it is. It drives them both.

The trees grow older and taller as she walks, until finally she emerges into the clearing: a gap in the woods, where sunlight falls in a bright ladder to touch a grassy sward. She has met Diana here for years now, to clash and to teach and to make ready, to forge her into the weapon she was born to be. To make her into a blade that will strike the heart of War--

She stops when she sees Diana sitting on a log on the far edge of the clearing, her head bent over something cradled in her hands. As Antiope watches, Diana lifts her head and gazes up into the treetops, then whistles a bright little chirp of song. A sparrow hops down out of the trees and lands on Diana’s cupped hands, plucking a berry from them. Diana is wearing a flower crown, gold and scarlet against her dark curls, ever so slightly askew, and Antiope’s heart turns over at the sight of her smiling down at the small ball of feathers in her hand. 

She takes a step forward, and the sparrow startles and flies away.

“Aunt!” Diana doesn’t stop smiling when she sees her, but it becomes ever-so-slightly more cautious. _Never let your guard down_. Wasn’t that one of the first things Antiope taught her, after all? “I found the _best_ blackberries on the way here.” She starts to put them down, to rise and begin her training, but Antiope makes a quick gesture before she even realizes what she’s doing. Diana stops and waits as though for a command.

“You can finish them, if you want,” Antiope says. “Lessons can wait for a moment.”

Diana looks down at them, then back up. Her smile is shy. “Would you like some?”

Antiope crosses the clearing and sits down on the mossy log with her. “I’d love a few,” she says.

Diana scrupulously divides the berries in half, and they sit together and eat them in companionable silence, listening to the slow, inexorable swell of the ocean in the distance. The low, insistent thrum in Antiope’s veins-- _be ready, be ready_ \--never fades, but it can wait for a moment. For a moment they are not general and trainee, but aunt and niece, sitting in the sunlight together, hands sticky with blackberries.


End file.
